Tadeusz J. Zieliński

Matters of Conscience and Religion in the Constitution of 17 March 1921 and Their Regulation in Later Polish Fundamental Acts

The first full constitution of the reborn independent Polish state, adopted in March 1921, should be seen as, for many reasons, a liberal regulation. The latter two constitutions were shaped for the needs of states: authoritarian one (the April 1935 Constitution) and totalitarian, later dictatorial one (the July 1952 Constitution). It was only the Constitution of the Third Republic of 1997 that became a worthy successor to the March Constitution, both in terms of the governing system and the system of protection of the freedoms and rights of the individual. The basic law currently in force meets the highest standards of global constitutionalism.

Many constitutional regulations in force in the world prove that the way in which they deal with legal and religious issues is usually a derivative of the political and axiological assumptions adopted in these acts. It is also visible in the twentieth-century Polish constitutions. The March Constitution created a wide-ranging space for religious freedom, the April and July constitutions were the grounds for restrictions in this respect, and finally, the binding Constitution of 1997 may be the basis for establishing liberal legal regulations and corresponding liberal governmental practices.

The liberal basic laws of 1921 and 1997 include provisions on the obligation for the Polish state to conclude legal agreements (concordats) with the supreme authority of the Catholic Church, i.e. with the Holy See. In each case, these agreements resulted in a distortion of the constitutional model of state-religion relations towards the preferences of Catholicism, and thus opened the way to the construction of a largely benign Catholic religious state in Poland in the 1930s and the second and third decades of the present century. Looking at the same phenomenon in a different way, one can say the following: the strong integrist Catholic circles in Poland in the process of establishing democratic constitutions were not able to introduce into them the concept of a tolerant Catholic republic. Their idea, however, was successful by using the concordat as an instrument to implement their hegemonic vision and by persistently ignoring the provisions of the fundamental laws.